


Bone

by greenjudy



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Knitting, Things Unsaid, downtime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 08:54:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3203315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before he knew what he was about, he’d reached out a hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bone

Her knitting needles were made of bone.

They’d come out of her purse one drizzly afternoon in the tent, lamps lit within, Cole curled like a cat at her feet. They were all packed in together, recuperating after fighting Darkspawn dug in up the Long River for most of the day previous; Solas had gotten to mending a rent in his vest with a needle and thread and she had looked at him, her head on one side. 

Busy hands, Blackwall thought, wishing for a bit of wood and his little chisel, left behind at Skyhold. 

She pulled free the needles then, long and slender, from her purse, and a mass of fine, fawn-colored yarn came after, not far off the color of her hair. 

She caught him watching, and she looked down at this remarkable stuff all over her lap, for all the world a little embarrassed, and he couldn’t make out why. 

“It’s not what it should be. They always said my hands were too rough for knitting,” she said. “The callouses.” 

“Ah, they caught on the threads?” Solas asked kindly. She set her face at that.

“It was true,” she said. “But I kept on anyway.”

She’s working elf-lace, Blackwall realized suddenly. 

\--

His mother and sister had never had anything so fine. They’d made their own things, nice things, but they talked about it, the Ring-veil, lace so delicately made you could pass it through your wedding-band.

You’d see it in Orlais, in the bazaars. He knew the elves made it, knew the merchants sold it to the high end for a lot of money. Money, he suspected, those elf-knitters never did see. 

It had looked…remote, somehow, _too good_ for the Orlesians, and it was hard to understand how it came alive in a cramped aravel, or in the hands of a hunter, waiting all day long in a thorn brake for prey.

Before he knew what he was about, he’d reached out a hand. The lace, spread on her bedroll, had a soft halo. He almost touched it, then stopped. Put his hand down on her bedroll, next to her work, and left it there, unable, after all, to move away.

“It’s funny,” she said then, looking at his hand. “The sheep are scrawny, tiny… they live on next to nothing when we see a bad winter. We take the babies up into the aravels sometimes, when it freezes. Poor animals, they have so much hardship. And the loveliest fleece you ever saw.” 

“That seems to be the way of your kind, Lavellan,” Solas said. 

“There’s a great many twisty leaves all patterned into your yarn tangle,” Cole said. 

“You’re awake?” she asked.

“I’m always awake,” he said.

“The patterns honor the gods,” the Inquisitor said. Blackwall lifted his face to her in surprise. 

“Do they at that? I hadn’t realized. I don’t imagine the Orlesian upper crusts who wear the stuff know that either.” He chuckled, considering, looked down at the repeating crossed twist, the spiral that looked like a flower. “And this?”

“It’s for Elgar’nan,” she said. “We call it crux-and-thistle.” 

“Do they all get lace shawls, all the gods?” Cole asked. 

The Inquisitor’s mouth crooked in a smile.

\--

When he first met Lavellan, he thought: reedy little thing. Then he stopped the arrow meant for her head, and then there was fighting, and the strength in her blows made the hairs stand up along his arms. 

She was carrying a maul almost the size of herself. At first he didn’t understand it. Made assumptions: she’s little, it’s big, how the Maker does she manage? Armed with it she could not move as quickly as he, with all his bulk. But when she struck, her entire body moved as a whole; she broke bone. 

“I admire you,” he told her, back at Haven.

I admire you, he thought in the tent, watching her hands. 

How clear has he been, he wondered, how obvious? And how unclear, he thought carefully, painfully, would he have to be, if she were to look and look again with these looks she had started to give him?

It must stop, he thought. I’m a fool. It must stop.

**Author's Note:**

> I think there's a case to be made that if there is any art similar to Shetland knitting to be found in Thedas, it would be worked by elves. It is hard to imagine the Dalish giving anything, willingly, to the shemlen, even for pay. It is more likely the city elves who would make the stuff, building it out of patterns whose names and purposes they'd lost a long time ago. But I can imagine how it might happen that even the Dalish, pinned down by incipient famine, would sell some things to survive, even to shemlen: Luxury emerging out of dreadful poverty, as it so often does. 
> 
> Some warping of the lore inevitably had to occur to produce the elf-lace Blackwall sees come out of the Inquisitor's bag; notably, I've given the Lavellan sturdy little sheep to follow the aravels along with the halla.
> 
> It may seem strange to carry lace all the way to the Storm Coast. But lace projects, for all their tangle, are not bad for downtime; they're light and packable, as even big swaths of the stuff can be compressed to fit in a small space. If Dalish yarn is anything like Shetland wool, it can withstand awkward conditions and quite a bit of working.


End file.
